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Fire chief: internal fire spread ‘bigger story’ than cladding at Grenfell
Internal fire spread was a “bigger story” at the Grenfell Tower fire than the cladding, a senior firefighter has told the Grenfell Inquiry.
Andrew Roe, assistant commissioner at the London Fire Brigade, made the comments this week as firefighters’ evidence to the inquiry drew to a close.
He said: “In the case of Grenfell, one of the first things I thought was not about the facade, but that there must have been significant failure in terms of the internal compartmentation, because the facade alone could not explain what I saw.
“Quite rightly, questions have focused on the facade for a lot of this inquiry and the media itself, but actually I think the bigger story is about how we got to that place of such rapid and catastrophic internal fire spread, and my immediate thought was that something had gone very wrong inside the building as well.”
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Although he clarified that he is not a fire investigator, he said that as he looked at the fire on the night, he thought that “voids” in the building installed as part of the renovation were causing fire to spread through the building internally.
In her expert report to the inquiry, Dr Barbara Lane, a fire engineer at Arup, said that the installation of a new gas supply in the building has “incomplete compartmentation works and incomplete ventilation works”.
On the day of the fire itself, Inside Housing reported that this work involved the temporary removal of fire safeguards in the floors intended to prevent the spread of flame.
Documents from the planning application indicated that ‘fire-stopping’ – systems used to seal openings and joints to prevent the spread of fire – had to be partially removed in order to install new pipes.
